Casa di Giuseppe II

Links for this house

Form of house

This house had one entrance on the south side of the street between Insulae VIII 2
and VIII 6. It had a ground-floor area of c. 850 m2, thus belonging to
Wallace-Hadrill's Quartile 4 (1994:81). The house had a relatively
standard front-hall/garden plan but with a terrace rather than a garden and
underground rooms below the terrace.

Excavation recording

This house was first excavated intermittently between April 1767 and July 1769.
Excavations were later carried out in October 1885. The earlier excavations here
provided more careful documentation of the finds than those of 1826 in the last
three houses. The recorders were still not particular about precise provenances,
however. Because this was seen as a rich house, the recording seems a little more
attentive than that of the other houses in this insula despite the earlier
excavation dates. Between 1994 and 1996, excavations of the ground floor of this
house below the AD 79 level were carried out by a team from La Sapienza (Rome)
directed by Paolo Carafa.

Interpretation of whole house

According to Mau (1887:122), this house originally had five or six spacious cubicula
and a triclinium around the front hall. Later, two or three of the cubicula had been
converted into storerooms and another into a stairway. Another had a lararium niche.
The triclinium had been adapted for domestic use and an upper floor had been
constructed. Noack and Lehmann-Hartleben (1936:30) dated these alterations to after
the Fourth Style, believing that the living area of the house had been divided into
separate apartments. Although they were not able to associate these alterations
directly with the AD 62 earthquake, they dated them to c. AD 65 (see Carafa and
D'Alessio 1995/1996:140). While post-Fourth Style alterations were
observable in the front hall, room c, room d', stairway n, room m, and rooms f' and
f", white-plastered storerooms, such as rooms l and k, are frequently found around
front halls (for example, the Casa di Julius Polybius, Casa del Fabbro, Casa delle Nozze
d'Argento). Their presence is not necessarily a sign of changed
living conditions. However, the evidence for disruption in the front hall, for
possible downgrading in room c and rooms f' and f", the possibility that the
entertainment area had not been functioning, and that the bath complex had gone out
of use after it had been decorated in the Fourth Style, all imply a late
rearrangement and downgrading of the house. Noack and Leben-Hartleben dated much of
the Fourth Style decoration before AD 62, presumably on the premise that alterations
to this decoration were necessitated by that earthquake. This dating cannot be
verified by the material remains, however. Equally possible is that this house, as
is argued for many others in this study, had constantly been altered during the last years.